Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Splitting Hairs
Yesterday, in writing an email, I wrote "a whole nother thing. . ." and thought, "man, that doesn't look right at all." So I erased it and re-wrote the sentence. But I continued to think about "a whole nother," because I've used those words in casual conversation plenty of times before. Why did it look so bad in print?

And then I realized what I meant to communicate was, "another whole thing".

For many years now I've known that it's bad form to split an infinitive. How bad is it to split an adjective?

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